I have a book review of sorts to post later for SBD, but first, I wanted to share some links and videos.

Er, also, today is the deadline for AAR’s Top 100 voting. I couldn’t be arsed to list 100 books. Really, I get lost after the first 20 or so. But it’s always interesting to see what other people through were the best of romance to date. When the list is published, I’ll give my opinion book by book, just to compare my taste with the standard/average reader taste.

Now, onto the links and videos.

First, okay, government cheese, yes, whatever, plus the farm subsidy, which needs to be seriously reconsidered. But now the federal government is pushing the consumption of even more cheese?

Second, courtesy of Bill in Exile, is this very funny video explaining the Fed’s retarded fiscal policy, quantitative easing.

Next, a while ago TBC and I discussed how we preferred different versions of songs, live vs. album vs. covered by others. For example, Green Day’s Whatshername on the album is pretty good but not my favorite song and the version of the cast album is ~meh~ to me. And yet I love this version from the AOL Sessions (despite all the guyliner John Gallagher Jr. is sporting):

And last, seriously, would you ever guess that this guy was a governor?

Photo courtesy of Midnight Sun.

His band, O’Malley’s March, played local gigs before his political career kicked into high(ish) gear, first as mayor of Baltimore then governor of Maryland. I heard on the radio that last year they played at the Baltimore Irish Festival, so I’m assuming they still fit some performances in with the busy gubernatorial schedule.

7 responses to “Oh, hey, look at the shiny pretty”

I made it about 20 seconds into the quantitative easing video. “because printing money is the last refuge of failed states and banana republics”. Oh, for heaven’s sake! Very subtle understanding of the economics of the matter and the nature of the current crisis

That line is one that I would not have included. And no, it’s subtle. But it asks a valid question (IMO): is buying government securities going to help? Or are other actions that should or could be taken that would have a better return/result?

Oh, yes, the question is valid, and it’s possible that there might be better actions to take, but I’ve made it almost to the halfway point, and the analysis is so riddled with stuff that’s completely wrong that I can’t take this seriously. That whole extremely simplistic “prices going down in a recession is bad? Yeah, right!”? Well, go ask Japan how deflation worked for them. The expression “lost decade” comes to mind. And if you actually think about it, rather that stop at the “duh!” fact that you’d rather pay less money for stuff, it’s not so hard to understand why deflation’s actually not such a great idea. Prices go down, people postpone non-essential purchases (because if prices are going down, you’re not going to buy now), so demand goes down, so prices go down even further, so people continue not to buy and demand continues to be depressed and so on. Presto, inflationary spiral! And if you look at places where that’s happened, it’s devilishly difficult to snap a country out of one. I had a quick look online, and here’s an article from Krugman that sets it (and other arguments) out very clearly and non-wonkishly: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/why-is-deflation-bad/
And there’s plenty of other idiocy in the bits of the video I managed to sit through. For instance, the implication that rising commodity prices demonstrate inflationary pressures, when they actually just jump around like crazy (since I was just at Krugman’s blog, I think he had a graph a while ago… ah, here you go: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/commodity-prices/ )? I can just shake my head at that.
Anyway, sorry about the rant, but that sort of thing really touches a nerve with me.

Nothing to apologize for!
I follow Krugman’s blog and appreciate him breaking economic issues into simple terms that make sense to a layperson like me.
While I understand that deflation needs to be avoided, I’m still not sold on the Fed’s solution. Of course, given the low likelihood of anything helpful coming from the newly elected Congress, the Fed’s efforts are probably going to be the only ones forthcoming.

I’m catching up on posts and I swear I could talk music all day but the thing that is on my brain right now is how much I love Neil Diamond’s Hot August Nights album for being so raw and yeah, that’s me outing myself as so uncool.
Cindys

Sorry, my e-mail was down – Hmmm, I grew up on Neil Diamond who was soft rock if rock at all. But Hot August nights is live and rough and hard. I would try a few tracks from it – age is awful as I can’t remember the songs titles. Gah.